An Absence of Light (3 page)

“What do you think?” Graver asked finally. He wanted a measure of Tordella’s gut reaction. He wanted the experienced detective’s feel for the scene.

“Well, I’ve been here only a little while myself,” he said pointedly, shaking his head, “but not knowing anything else about it, just looking at it, I’d lean toward suicide.”

Graver was relieved, but only momentarily. Still, at this point, even a temporary reprieve was welcome. They didn’t say anything for a minute, watching the woman from the Crime Scene Unit as she videotaped the car and its contents, working it from every conceivable angle and perspective. When she was finished, Graver felt the detective looking at him. Taking his eyes off the car, he looked around. Tordella’s sagging eyes were emotionless, his mouth slightly puckered on one side as he worked at the ends of his mustache.

“Okay, let’s take a look,” Graver said.

Tordella ducked his head, and they started toward Tisler’s car. Though there hadn’t been enough rain to create mud, it was damp enough to cause the soil to cake to Graver’s shoes. Tordella stopped him behind the yellow ribbon that had been stretched on the ground in front of the open car door and was held in place by a couple of sticks jabbed into the dirt.

“We’re still looking for something over there,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the other side of the ribbon.

In the headlight beams of the patrol unit, Graver could see Tisler’s leg under the steering wheel, slanting awkwardly with his foot out the open door, his body slumped into the darkness toward the passenger seat. The beams backlighted the window of the open door on the driver’s side, setting aglow the rusty splatter on the glass, the particulate matter that had been part of the contents of Tisler’s head.

Buttoning his suit coat so the tails wouldn’t be in the way, Graver stepped over the yellow ribbon and walked up to the door, careful about the grass at his feet He put his hands in his pockets, set his jaw, and looked inside.

Tisler had been sitting behind the steering wheel when the shot was fired, but his upper body was now laying over on the passenger side, his blasted head partially submerged in the black syrup that had pooled in the depression of the seat His right leg was twisted awkwardly under the steering wheel column, his left one stretched full-length, sticking out the door. His right arm was flung out, hanging over the edge of the seat, and under it on the floor was a handgun, an automatic. There was a world of blood, and Graver could smell it, an oddly precise odor, a kind of musty sweetness, like something that had been stored in a dank cellar, something old. It was, he thought, an odor that probably had not changed in all the millennia of human history, that surely had smelled exactly like this ever since the day that Cain became the first man to breathe it.

Tordella pointed at the inside of the doorjamb, at the button that allowed the light to come on when the door was opened.

“He wedged a wooden match next to the button to keep it pushed in,” he said. “I guess maybe he sat here a while before he did it and didn’t want to attract attention.” He gestured toward the dashboard. “Radio’s on, but the volume’s turned down. You wonder why he didn’t just turn it off.”

“And the door was open like this?”

“Yeah, just like this. And look.” Tordella leaned across in front of Graver and pointed to the edge of the open door. “I think the damned bullet nicked the door frame. That’s what we’re looking for in the grass there, the slug.”

“There’s no note?”

“We haven’t found one”—Tordella shrugged, nibbling at his mustache—”but we haven’t gone through all of his clothes yet, or the car.”

He shone his flashlight around inside the car. A pair of trousers on a coat hanger covered with clear plastic was hanging behind the passenger’s side in the back; a pink laundry slip was stapled to the plastic. There was nothing else in the back seat, no litter, no clutter, no overlooked gum wrappers.

“Was he a neat person, like this?” Tordella nodded at the back seat.

“He was neat,” Graver said.

“Somebody might’ve cleaned it up. Or I guess he might’ve. You know, the way they do sometimes.”

There were a lot of myths about suicides, about how they often carefully planned their deaths, about their oddly scrupulous behavior before they died, about the strange logic of their dementia. But Graver never had been impressed by any of that. He did not find such generalities particularly convincing because he did not think of suicides as a single, peculiar species with specific, identifiable characteristics. Mentally disturbed people committed suicide. Intelligent, well-balanced people committed suicide. Cowards committed suicide and heroes too. Richard Cory killed himself, as did Judas. And Socrates. Graver saw very little in such a diversity that lent itself to generalization. He was invariably suspicious of simple, formulaic explanations to anything; axioms made him uneasy.

A small, twin-engine aircraft came whining down the tarmac toward them and lifted off so low over their heads that Graver could feel the props rumbling in his chest. Everyone turned and looked up at it, toward the sound of it, lifting up into the darkness.

“I guess we’ll get started, then,” Tordella said, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, popping the latex at his wrists. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas about this.”

Graver shook his head. “Not a clue. His squad supervisor is Ray Besom. Normally he would know if Tisler was working tonight, but he’s on vacation, a fishing trip down near Port Isabel. And I imagine Dean Burtell might know.”

“Burtell?”

“He’s the analyst who works with Tisler most of the time.”

Tordella nodded some more, studiously avoiding Graver’s eyes as he interlaced the fingers of his hands and tamped the gloves tight.

“Okay. Well, look, stop us if you want to see something or have questions or anything,” he said, flicking a glance at Graver. “Otherwise, considering who we got here, I’m going to work it up in detail.”

Graver turned and walked back to his car, out of the white glare of the headlights. Pio Tordella was only the first in a long line of people who were going to be looking over Graver’s shoulder on this one. The unexplained death of an intelligence officer had the effect of producing the maximum amount of suspicion with the least hope of having it resolved. There was no way to avoid the immediate assumption by others that something had gone terribly wrong in the Division where secrets were the stock in trade.

Leaning against the front fender, Graver watched them play out what had become a modern ritual of American urban culture. For a few hours the evening had been cooled by the passing showers, but now the stifling heat was already returning, and the night was growing steamy. It was difficult to tell whether the moisture enveloping his skin was from the incredible humidity or from seeping perspiration. The unusually wet spring and early onset of summer heat had spawned a richness of insects in the tall, weedy grass from which they now emerged in swarms that grew thicker by the minute, fogging to the bright beams of the squad car, flitting like sparks in the reflected light.

While Tordella’s partner disappeared behind the dark side of Tisler’s car, Tordella consulted with the coroner’s investigator and the woman from the Crime Scene Unit Standing in the glittering cloud of insects, he talked, gesturing with his pale latex hands, his figure casting jerky shadows across the gaping door of the car behind him.

Graver looked at Tisler again, at his skewed leg glimpsed in the fluttering darkness, and he could almost make himself believe that Tisler had moved, that the awkward sprawl of his torso was a posture of resistance, as if, in the unexpected terror of that God-abandoned last moment, he had changed his mind and was struggling desperately to keep from being swallowed headfirst into the black throat of eternity.

Herb Katz lighted a cigarette. He was wearing a jogging suit, though Graver knew that Katz probably had not jogged fifty yards since he left the Police Academy more than twenty years ago.

“What did Westrate say when you called him?” Graver asked.

He and Katz were leaning back against the front of Graver’s car watching Charlie Bricker and Hodge Petersen from the Internal Affairs Division pore over the car and its contents with Tordella and his partner. The lights on the patrol car had been replaced with portable floodlights from the CSU, and the two unit investigators were dusting the car and gathering samples.

“‘Son of a
bitch!’
“Katz said, imitating Westrate’s strident voice. “Why didn’t you call him?”

“I knew you would.”

Graver was standing with his arms crossed, his legs crossed at the ankles. He and Katz were about the same age and first had met when they were in Homicide. Swarthy and good-looking, Katz had thick black hair and the kind of genes that would keep it black long after most people his age would be using special shampoo in the hope of keeping what was left of their gray hair. Graver had always thought there was something Slavic about his features. He had a wife, two daughters, and a son. Like Graver’s own son and daughter, they were all in college now.

Katz also had a mistress. As long as Graver had known him he had always had a woman on the side, though Graver had never heard anyone refer to this. Katz was discreet He was clever. There had been a few times in the past several years when Graver could tell that Katz was itching to know if Graver was aware of his dalliances, but Katz never made the mistake of trying a coy probe to find out. Graver saw that kind of thing a lot. When you had been in CID as long as he had, you saw it in everyone’s behavior sooner or later. They wondered just how many of their skeletons you knew about Those who tended to indulge in guilty consciences avoided you. The cynics assumed you knew just about everything and treated you with a rakish indifference. Katz was a cynic but, aside from that, he wasn’t the kind of man who allowed himself to be haunted by guilt.

“He told me to get back to him as soon as I knew something,” Katz said. “I could hear the panic in his voice. I think he was having a party. His wife answered, and when he came to the phone I could hear a lot of voices in the background.”

Over at Tisler’s car they were making efforts to move his body so that they could look under him. Everyone was trying to keep the blood off of them, but Tisler’s limbs had stiffened at awkward angles, making the job impossible.

“If they make it a homicide,” Graver said, “Jack’s going to go head to lead with Lukens.”

Ward Lukens was the assistant chief responsible for Management Services and Westrate’s principal rival in the power politics that constantly embroiled the ten assistant chiefs. Internal Affairs was his dog, and a homicide in the Intelligence Division would give him an opening to investigate Westrate’s prized possession and the most protected division in the department It meant an interdivisional imbroglio that could easily break out in the open.

“Okay, what about it, Marcus?” Katz tilted his head toward the bloody car in front of them. “Would suicide surprise you?”

“Suicide would surprise me,” Graver assented. “Murder would surprise me even more—and scare the hell out of me.”

“Then he wasn’t working on anything that you think could have conceivably led to this?”

Graver shook his head. “Not really.”

Katz turned and looked at Graver. “Creeping Jesus,” he said. “What does that mean?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so. Not him, not any of the investigators. His informants, maybe. You think of the informants, the sources, being at risk, not the investigators.”

“Even if it’s suicide you’re going to have a hell of a time convincing some people that it wasn’t related to spooking.”

“Some people?”

“Just about everybody, I guess.”

“Yeah, that’s what I guess.”

“Jesus, that’s grisly,” Katz said.

They were watching the morgue van attendants and the detectives wrestle Tisler’s rigid torso out of the front seat. His stiff sprawl was causing his arms and legs to hang on the door frame and then a corner of the seat as they turned him and twisted him and maneuvered him out of the car.

When the deed was done, when the doors of the morgue van finally closed on Tisler’s demise, the four detectives stood in the floodlights just inside the yellow ribbon and pulled off their latex gloves, tossing them into a paper sack. Charlie Bricker was the first to speak. He was tall and lanky, and he spoke to Tordella, looking down at the stocky detective. Whatever he said caused Tordella to nod and nod and then shake his head. Hodge Petersen put in a few words. Tordella shrugged. Tordella then seemed to make a point, turning partly toward the car behind him, gesturing over his shoulder. He asked his partner something, and the young man shook his head. Petersen took out his notebook and a ballpoint pen and made some notes. Tordella leaned forward and made a point of saying something to Petersen; Petersen nodded and kept writing. Bricker thrust his hands into his pockets, rocked back on his heels and said something as he wagged his head side to side as though he were reciting a set of rules. They all nodded in agreement.

“This ought to be interesting,” Katz said.

At that point they broke from their loose huddle and came across the grass, through the dizzy fog of insects attracted to the floodlights.

“Well”—Tordella was the first to speak as the four of them approached—”we all pretty much agree that we just don’t see anything indicating foul play here.” He was addressing Katz this time, his boss, who was leaning his forearms on the fender of the car as he smoked, as if he were watching a game of pick-up basketball.

“It just looks like he shot himself is all,” Tordella added. “I mean, that’s what the physical evidence seems to point to. But there are still the fingerprints to think about, the autopsy, whatever the CSU might come up with, all that. IAD’s going to need some stuff.”

Charlie Bricker nodded. He was actually assigned to Narcotics but was pulling his eighteen-month stint in IAD, a requisite tour of duty that rotated among officers in all divisions. This was a universally dreaded duty, partly because the job involved investigating fellow officers, which no one liked to do, and partly because there was no overtime allowed in IAD, which adversely affected your monthly income. Internal Affairs detectives were often in a bad mood.